Two colorful generic soda can labels

These two generic soda can labels were created with a frustratingly massive amount of urgency behind them. I had all of 30 minutes to create some fake soda labels to cover up some cans in a photo shoot I was involved in – which wasn’t fun. These were critical background props that were going to be out of focus, so it didn’t really matter all that much how realistic they were.

generic soda can label

Colorful generic diet soda can label – the yellow version

I’m not sure about other visual designers out there, but this is my favorite type of assignment. No picky clients, no challenging requirements (other than time)…pretty much anything goes and I can just throw stuff together without any concern for branding guidelines or product messaging. As a matter of fact, that’s how I recently created a very useful vector lines background image (that I use for pretty much everything these days).

When things don’t have to be pixel-perfect, I can pretty much arrange anything on the canvas into a composition that looks halfway decent. I love it!

The bad thing about all that, however, is that it’s rare for good design to happen when things are so fast and loose, and I definitely wouldn’t want people to think that I actually spent time on these. I’m not proud of these labels, but they served their purpose well (at least that’s what’s important).

red diet soda can label

I made a red version as well. Which do you like better?

It’s projects like this where trashedgraphics.com really comes in handy. You notice that bar code in there? And that nutrition label? Yes, these are graphics that I created previously for other projects that I thought I would never have the need for ever again. But I’m glad I had those elements ready and available, as that made it possible to be able to crank these generic labels out so quickly.

Anyway, both of these are fully editable layered PSD files with some vector elements thrown in for scalability. The logos and branding for each are all vector, which is the most important part – you may want to adjust the rest anyway if you want to use these graphics for anything halfway-important.


give me the PSD

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